MSI X99A Xpower Gaming Titanium Review

Table of Contents

Introduction, Design & Features

Intel’s heavy-duty "Broadwell-E" processors inspired motherboard makers to refresh their Intel X99 boards earlier this year, giving well-heeled gamers and enthusiasts a difficult choice. Should they stay with their current X99 board, or use the processor update as an excuse to snag a new motherboard, as well?

If you're a sucker for unique aesthetics and busloads of features, once you check out MSI’s new X99A Xpower Gaming Titanium, we suspect you’ll be leaning towards the latter. Then the question may come down to your budget. The X99A Xpower Gaming Titanium lists for $429, and was selling for between $360 and $420 online when we wrote this in late September 2016. Can you swing that, along with a pricey Broadwell-E chip?

The X99A Xpower Gaming Titanium supports the four Broadwell-E processors that arrived this summer, including the 10-core Intel Core i7-6950X Extreme Edition that we reviewed some weeks back, along with the older "Haswell-E" CPUs that have been available since 2014. (The board uses the LGA 2011-v3 socket that the two most recent generations of Intel "Extreme" CPU require.) The X99 chipset is designed to handle a full complement of high-end components, making it a solid choice for extreme gamers and enthusiasts who often use more than one graphics card, along with lots of high-speed storage and other bandwidth-craving components.

As large as this 10.7x12-inch Extended-ATX (E-ATX) motherboard is, it looks crowded—because it is. The board is lined with legions of headers and buttons, some of which are squeezed into weird locations (like the Flashback+ button, which we’ll talk about later). But that’s a small price to pay for what you get, which is an array of extra features that make the X99A Xpower Gaming Titanium a much more versatile board than many of its competitors.

Board Layout

The one area of this motherboard that isn’t crowded is the space around its LGA 2011-v3 CPU socket. MSI gave the socket plenty of room on all four sides, so you’re not likely to run into any trouble with bulky CPU air coolers. (That said, we suspect most of the folks in the running for this board are enthusiasts who might opt for liquid cooling, which tends to mean trimmer hardware on the socket.) The processor socket sits directly below 12 power phases, which should help provide stable power to the CPU. The socket itself is a sturdy affair with the typical two-arm setup to make processor installation a smooth drop-in process.

Thanks to its eight memory slots, the X99A Xpower Gaming Titanium supports up to 128GB of DDR4 modules in a quad-channel configuration. MSI doesn’t color-code its slots here, which is too bad, because color-coded slots would help with memory installation, and the colors probably wouldn’t be visible once the memory is installed. But the manual walks you through the installation process and has diagrams that show you which slots to populate with your particular set of memory.

Heatsinks, buttons, and other components hem in the memory on three sides, but installing the actual RAM DIMMs isn’t difficult. We were also able to reseat a loose module without having to remove any parts, though we would have had to pull out our Thermaltake Water 2.0 Pro liquid-cooling unit if we had a need to adjust the far-left memory module.

When it comes to looks, motherboard makers are in a tough spot. On the one hand, at least some of the motherboard will be visible from the typical tower case window, which means that aesthetics will carry some weight in buying decisions. On the other, motherboards don’t have much in the way of uncluttered surface area that can be used for logos or other design touches. More often than not, a motherboard’s biggest aesthetic flourish is the color of the printed circuit board. EVGA, for example, opted for a more sedate look with its EVGA X99 FTW K, which we recently reviewed. The X99 FTW K has just a few red lights and flourishes that add a touch of personality. We think EVGA should have added more color to that board, because it tends to fade into the shadows of the case interior once installed.

But MSI managed to give the X99A Xpower Gaming Titanium loads of character by making nearly all of it silver. The faux-titanium look contrasts nicely with the black capacitors and the few other black parts on the motherboard, ensuring that your motherboard will be very visible from the case window. The distinct coloring alone makes the X99A Xpower Gaming Titanium one of the best-looking motherboards we’ve encountered recently.

MSI gave the board some extra attitude by putting an eye-catching, dragon cutout on the heatsink over the X99 chipset. The "AUDIO BOOST 3" and "TITANIUM" cutouts on the I/O guard also look great, though the former one will almost certainly be obscured by your video card or cards once they're installed.

Metal “armor” (as MSI refers to it) is another key feature on this case, with sheaths of metal bracing the long PCI Express slots, the DIMM slots, and even the M.2 drive slot. It isn’t just for show: It provides extra toughness for important parts, including the PCI Express slots, which should be better able to handle the weight of heavy graphics cards if you are transporting the PC gaming events (or just down to your basement den).

Our only complaint about the color scheme is that MSI opted for silver labels on most of the board. It’s tough to read motherboard labels under normal circumstances, as they’re usually tiny and squeezed between headers and other components. But the silver-on-silver labels here are extra-tough to read, especially in the dim light of a case interior. Black labels might have been a better choice and wouldn’t have disrupted the board’s black-and-silver looks.

Speaking of video cards, the X99A Xpower Gaming Titanium is well-equipped to handle several AMD or Nvidia cards, and the board’s accessory bundle includes multiple SLI bridges, among other niceties that we'll detail later on. A PCI Express (PCIe) 3.0 x16 slot sits nearest the CPU, followed by two PCIe 3.0 x8 slots, another PCIe x16 slot, a PCIe 2.0 x1 slot and a PCIe 3.0 x4/x8 slot. (Note that all of the slots, barring the x1, are full-length.) As should be obvious from the board's name, MSI targets this board at gamers, and it clearly expects customers to bring large, powerful video cards to the table, and not just one. In addition to reinforcing the slots with metal banding, MSI includes illustrated instructions in the board's manual for installing and connecting graphics cards in various configurations.

The short PCIe x1 slot typically means there's some wasted space behind it, but MSI and other motherboard makers have started using that space to add support for M.2 solid-state-drive (SSD) storage. (See our primer on The Best M.2 Solid-State Drives.) The included thumbscrew lets you mount a single 42mm, 60mm, or 80mm M.2 drive in just a minute or three.

Ports & Headers

The MSI X99A Xpower Gaming Titanium has a solid I/O setup, complete with USB 3.1 Type-A and Type-C ports to handle your most modern, bandwidth-hungry external drives and peripherals. The company even threw in a PS/2 port for your old-school mouse or keyboard.

More important, the I/O panel has six USB 3.1 (Gen 1) ports and three USB 2.0 ports, one of which doubles as a BIOS Flashback+ port. This latter feature lets you install a BIOS update without even entering the BIOS. To use it, just plug a USB drive (with the BIOS update on it) into the port with the system powered down (but plugged in), then press a button on the motherboard, near the graphics card. The board should then install the BIOS update on your flash drive without any other help or input.

Other I/O-panel features include surround-sound audio jacks, connectors for the motherboard’s two Wi-Fi antennas, a single Gigabit Ethernet port, and a Clear CMOS button. MSI recessed the latter button a bit, so you can’t inadvertently reset the CMOS, which is probably for the best.

A metal shield encases the rear of the I/O panel and houses a heatsink that connects to the heatsink over the motherboard’s power phases. If your case has a window, you’ll be able to see the "TITANIUM" label on the silver I/O cover—unless you mount a liquid-cooler radiator in front of it, as we did. (Hey, sometimes you have to put function over form.)

The X99A Xpower Gaming Titanium also has plenty of internal headers, including a sprinkling of fan headers. The CPU fan header sits in the upper-right corner, next to the debug LED. It’s on the other side of the memory from the LGA 2011-3 socket, but you can run the CPU fan wire around the power phases and above the memory to keep it mostly hidden from view. Three more fan headers line the right side of the board, one of which is designated as a water-pump connector. Two more fan headers are at the bottom of the board, and another header sits on the left side, near the memory slots. We used this header to connect one of our fans during the test build.

The board has 10 SATA 6Gbps connectors, giving even heavy-duty data users all the support for drives that they’re likely to need. Most of the SATA connectors sit horizontally on the board so that they point off the side of the motherboard, but four sit vertically, running around the corner to the bottom edge of the board, giving you cable-management options. You don’t have to set up a RAID array, but if you want to and are new to process, check out the Titanium board’s manual. It has excellent, step-by-step instructions for doing so.

Two USB 3.0 headers sit next to the SATA connectors, with a USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C connector on the other side of them. This is the first time we've seen a USB Type-C connector mounted directly on the board meant for use inside the system (as opposed to on the back I/O panel). It's not entirely clear what it's meant to be used for. But given that front-panel headers for USB 3.1 Gen 2/USB Type-C haven't come to market yet (at least that we've seen), the port here is probably meant to be used as a pass-through for future PC chassis with compatible front-panel ports. Aside from that, a U.2 connector (to the left of the SATA ports in the picture above) lets you install an NVMe storage device, such as Intel's wildly fast 750 Series SSD.

All of the headers at the bottom of the X99A Xpower Gaming Titanium sit vertically on the motherboard, with the exception of the auxiliary-power four-pin Molex connector, which is used to deliver additional juice from the power supply for multiple-graphics-card setups. There are also USB 2.0 headers, a connector for RGB LED lighting strips, and a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) header here.

A SATA Express (SATAe) connector also sits at the bottom of the board. The SATAe connector, in theory, lets you attach a single PCIe SSD to the motherboard, not that we've actually seen SSDs that use this connector yet. It's also designed to be a connector for two legacy SATA drives. (You can choose to use it either as a SATAe connector or two SATA connectors, but not both.)

Interestingly, the SATAe connector is switched off by default to free up bandwidth for one of the USB 3 headers on the right side of the motherboard. MSI assumes that you’re likely to prefer a couple more USB 3 ports at the front or rear of your case over use of the SATAe port. Considering that we still don't know of any shipping drives that use SATAe, this seems like a safe bet to us. If you do want use the SATAe port, you can enable it by flipping the switch beside it. But be forewarned that doing so will disable a USB header, as well as the bottom PCIe expansion slot, referred to as "PCI_E6" in the manual.

It gets even more complicated if, for example, you choose to leave the switch in its default position and put a card in the PCI_E6 slot, as that will prevent other connectors (such as the U.2 connector and M.2 connector) from being available. This is similar to the bandwidth-sharing that we saw on the Asus Republic of Gamers Strix X99 Gaming board. The good news is that MSI devotes several pages of its manual to illustrations of the board with different configurations so you can look up a configuration that best suits your hardware.

Aside from a plethora of headers and switches, the X99A Xpower Gaming Titanium also has a surprising number of onboard buttons. It’s not unusual to see a CMOS Reset button and (on high-end enthusiast boards) a switch for a dual BIOS (a savior feature if you botch an update), but MSI’s X99A Gaming Titanium goes way beyond the ordinary buttons and switches. Sitting at the top-right corner of the board is one of the largest knobs we’ve ever seen on a motherboard. Although the red top of the knob is the first thing you’ll notice, it’s actually the base of the knob that controls the overclocking feature. Known as the "Game Boost" dial, it can overclock Extreme Edition processors without using the BIOS. (Technically, you will need to enable this feature, once, in the BIOS before using the knob.) Turn the knob a notch, and your processor gets a shot in the arm, generally to the tune of a 200MHz clock boost.

As you can see above, the red-topped Game Boost knob is big and disrupts the silver/black theme, but we think plenty of overclockers won't want to overlook it, considering how handy this feature could be. That said, plenty of serious overclockers looking to get the best possible stable performance boost will want to stick to tweaking the granular settings in the BIOS.

MSI also includes an interesting solution for overclockers who push their system too far, handled by two smaller buttons at the bottom of the motherboard. If your system is having trouble booting due to overclocking issues, you can push and hold the "OC Retry" button to have it cycle through settings until the system boots. Alternately, you can push the other button next to the OC Retry button to skip the "OC_FAIL" message and boot directly to the BIOS.

Around the corner, just below the Game Boost dial, are Power and Reset buttons. You probably won’t use them often unless you install the motherboard on an open-air test bench, but they’re discreet and won’t block your access to anything. The more interesting buttons and switches sit next to the Power and Reset buttons. These are the "SW-TACT" buttons (they are topped with "+" and "-" symbols), which let you adjust CPU base clock (BCLK) without entering the BIOS. You can also use these buttons to adjust the clock ratio by flipping the nearby switch. That switch is a little more difficult to reach than the buttons, but chances are that you won’t be using it as often.

A four-switch block next to the Power, Reset and SW-TACT buttons controls the PCIe slots. All of the slots are in the On position by default. Simply flip one of the numbered switches to disable the corresponding PCIe slot. This can be useful for troubleshooting PCIe components, or for disabling one or more cards without pulling hardware from the slot (say, if you have elaborate liquid cooling installed).

If that sounds like a lot of buttons, hang on: We’re just getting started. The X99A Xpower Gaming Titanium also has a Discharge button, a Clear CMOS jumper, a USB switch, a dual-BIOS switch, and the BIOS Flashback+ button, tucked up near the PCIe slots.